American Academy of Religion

Review: The Gods and Soul: An Essay-Review

Author(s): David L. Miller
Source: Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 43, No. 3
(Sep., 1975), pp. 586-590
Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1461854
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The Gods and Soul:

An Essay-Review*
DAVID L.MILLER
N iconoclastic prophetism and a metaphoric reformation in the
published version of James Hillman's 1972 Terry Lectures at Yale
University make crucial for the study of Religion and at the same
Re- Visioning Psychology
time difficult to review. How is one to review a re-view, catching Hillman's own
episodic argument by its aphoristic tail while hunter and quarry are both running
in circles? I t is like trying to see the eye with which one is seeing. Viconian
cyclometry is never easy, but perhaps important.
Hillman's imaginal way of re-viewing psychology is seen in his master tropes.
Personifying is the re-peopling of the universe of meaning, seeing images in
ideas, and bringing thought to life by seeing life in thought. "Words are
persons," Hillman notes with the poet, and he adds a psychologist's
conclusion:
"Personifying is the soul's answer to egocentricity." Pathologizing is discovering
a
mythology in symptoms, finding stories in hurts, transforming messes into
variegated richness. This is perhaps most crucial of all the tropes, and it leads
Hillman to say: "By clinging faithfully to the pathological perspective which is
the
differential root of its discipline, distinguishing it from all others, depth
psychology maintains its integrity, becoming neither humanistic education,
spiritual guidance, social activity, nor secular religion." Psychologizing
(precisely the opposite of psychologism) is seeing through the literalism of every
positivism, metamorphosizing through metaphor, forsaking both letter and spirit
for soul. Hillman sees literalism psychologically as an ego viewpoint and
suggests the strategy of metaphor (performing one activity as if it were another)
as peculiarly felicitous for "soul-making" (his phrase for psychologizing).
Hillman wants to
'join Owen Barfield and Norman Brown in a mafia of the metaphor to protect
plain men from literalism" -and from the egoism of one-dimensional self
understanding. This leads Hillman to his fourth trope, dehumanizing, which is
understood as the release of the personal into deeper soul power, a transcendence
of epic voluntarism of ego into the mythological many-faceted nature of the

archetypal self (not just Oedipus, but all the presiding metaphors of all the
complexes). Since "humanism's psychology is the myth of man without myths,"
archetypal psychology means dehumanizing, archetypologizing, re-

Re- Visioning Psychology. By JAMES HILLMAN. New York: Harper & Row, 1975. xvii+266
pages. $12.50. L.C. No. 74-25691.
DA JJJ L. MILLER, Professor of Religion at Syracuse University, is presently in France writing. He IS the
author of Gods and Games and The New Polytheism.

586

mythologizing, and theologizing. "A re-vision of psychology," says Hillman,

"means recognizing that psychology does not take place without religion,
because there is always a God in what we are doing." Just the same, Hillman
wishes neither to psychologize religion nor to redeem it: "Archetypal
psychology's concern is not with the revival of religion, but with the survival of
soul." A glance at the topography of Hillman's argument will begin to
demonstrate how the gods and soul-power connect.
TOPOGRAPHY

1. Psychology. Hillman is to Jungian psychology as Norman 0. Brown is to

Freudian and as Ronald D. Laing is to Existentialist. Formally speaking, though
they disagree strongly in content, they are all radical revisionists. Hillman's new
work makes this observation particularly compelling when seen in relation to his
earlier writings. Re- Visioning Psychology stands in reference to the rest of the
corpus (principally The Myth of Analysis; Insearch; Suicide and the Soul;
Emotion; and the essays on Pan, Kundalini, Feeling, Anima, and the Child) as
Brown's Love's Body and Laing's Knots are to their earlier works (principally
Life Against Death and The Divided Self, respectively). Language in the later
works of each man explodes. The text approaches poetry, stopping just short of
lyric in aphorism. The "argument," if such a term is proper to the mode of
thinking in Knots, Love's Body, and Re- Visioning Psychology, is "episodic and
circular." A prose organization of Hillman's book may fool the reader into not
noticing that actually the work has no rigid beginning or ending, a characteristic
that the author has himself acknowledged. As Brown's, Laing's, and Hillman's
books "end," the texts turn back upon themselves, like literate Moebius strips,
and what may have seemed to have been statements in an argument turn into
self-implicating insights. The whole vanishes, leaving the reader with nothing to
see, but with something much more valuable: a way of seeing. So Hillman can
write:
The psychological mirror that walks down the road, the Knight Errant on his adventure,
the scrounging rogue, is also an odd-job man, like Eros the Carpenter who joins this bit
with that, a handyman, a b
ricoleur -like "a ball rebounding, a dog straying or a horse
swerving from its direct course" - psychologizing upon and about what is at hand; not a
systems-architect, a planner with directions. And leaving, before completion, suggestion
hanging in the air, an indirection, an open phrase.... (p. 164)

2. Philosophy. Such errancy talk as this and the observation of a formal

relation between Hillman's book and the latter-day thinking of Brown and Laing
brings to mind Wittgenstein and Heidegger. Like the works of these men, Re
Visioning Psychology goes beyond traditional metaphysics, at least beyond a
psychology which is trapped by Cartesian rationalism and Aristotelian
substantialism in ideas about the self. The transcendent leap-frogging appears,
not in the weighty manner of Heidegger in Being and Time, nor in the gamey
manner of Wittgenstein in the Tractatus; rather, Re- Visioning Psychology is

more like the later philosophical writings of Heidegger and Wittgenstein.

Hillman's new book stands in relation to his previous work exactly as
Heidegger's Gelassenheit and the essays on poetry are to Being and Time, and
as Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations are to the Tractatus and the later
essays. The Hillmanian breakthrough from rationalism and substantialism
is also indicated,

philosophically, by his move behind Descartes and Aristotle to Plato and

Heraclitus. Hillman is clearly a self-conscious friend of the Renaissance neo
platonists, which leads to a third way of placing his work.
3. Letters. In the realm of ideas Hillman's soul-mates are Gnosticism,
Alchemy, and Romanticism (especially William Blake). Yet all traces of
relativism, subjectivism, and psychologism are gone. They are precisely
the enemy, for they represent the ego turned inward upon its epic, voluntaristic,
rational, and heroic self. Hillman's viewing is archetypal and collective.
However, it is not collective in the sociological sense, but in some vertical
resonance that becomes trans-personal (he notes that in the term bathos, as used
by Heraclitus, depth was not distinguished from height). Psyche (soul) is not in
the personal self (ego), but the self is in objective soul. Mythology is the
universal location where soul makes itself manifest in some non-relativistic and
non-solipsistic sense. This places Hillman's work also in relation to Picasso and
Joyce for whom mythology was so important. Indeed, like Freud's work which,
as Hillman notes, won the Goethe prize for literature rather than the Nobel
Prize for medicine, Re- Visioning Psychology fits most appropriately in the
realm of imaginal psychology. Its creativity is manifest in the "heIter
skelter"form of the book. Digressions interrupt the sequences in the text by
coming out of the blue. Thematic materials are often expressed paradoxically
and seldom move develop_ Jentally. But the creativity is also found in the
substance of the work's metaphoric imagery. This occurs however not
without tough-headed and iconoclastic thinking.
4. Theology. Iconoclasm suggests prophetism and protestantism. To say that
Hillman's work is protestant will be offensive to its author. He spends much
space in the final sections of the book bemoaning the Germanic, Protestant tone
of contemporary psychology with its "literalism and voluntarism." He says: "It
does not matter whether we are behaviorists or strict Freudians, whether
we are engaged in self-mastery or self-surrender, introspection or statistics, or
whether we try to break loose with glossolalia, creative painting, and nude
encounters, psychology remains true to its Reformational background" (p. 220).
That Hillman feels negatively about such Reformation psychology becomes
clear when he remarks that all that is accomplished by it is that "the weight and
seriousness of psychotherapy (even in the California suqshine schools) create in
its participants new loads of guilt, now in regard to the morality of its
therapeutic aims" (p. 221 ).
Yet in spite of Hillman's anti-Protestant talk, nay, precisely because of his
protestant iconoclasm against Protestantism, Re- Visioning Psychology
is protestant. I t is not this in the socio-historical sense that the author is seeing
the Protestant Reformation, but rather in Paul Tillich's theo-philosophical sense
of "the protestant principle," where there abound categories of the autonomy
of grace and sin, the priesthood of all believers, and the bondage of the heroic
will of spirit in matters of ultimate meaning. All these notions, and especially
that of priesthood of all believers, implicate the "protestant principle" in an
unconscious conspiracy with Hillman in the direction of incipient polytheism, a
function that shows itself in the many denominations and sects that have
flourished within the "protestant" framework.
Hillman locates himself in this symbolic and metaphoric protestantizing, but

not with northern European churchism, when he writes on "The Empire of the
Roman Ego: Decline and Falling Apart." In this section he is careful to note the
close connection between Roman imperialism in religion and society, on the
one

hand, and the psychological fantasy of heroic egoism, on the other. Hillman
says: "If it is common today to fantasy our culture against that of old Rome, it
is partly because our psyche has undergone a long Pax Romana." But now
"central command is losing control" (p. 26). Theologically this puts ReVisioning Psychology near Luther and opposed to popery, but of course
also in direct opposition to sixteenth-century Protestant scholasticism and
Pharisaism.
Ex UNo PLURES

In all of this Hillman has associated himself with a number of writers who
have argued, not only for radical pluralism in self and society, but for cosmic
and ontic polytheism. Vincent Vycinas' Search for Gods (Nijhoff, 1972), the
new translation of Alain's Les Dieux (New Directions, 1974), and E. M.
Cioran's The New Gods (Quadrangle, 1974) are just a few examples. For
Vycinas the philosophical task is to search for the gods during the twilight of
the gods because the gods "carry the meanings and the realness of things." For
Alain, "the gods are everywhere ... Where there is only a man, there is a god."
And to Cioran, "monotheism contains the germ of every form of tyranny." The
question in these theorizings, as in that of Hillman, is why in the
plursignification of meaning, in the radical or ethnic pluralism of society, in the
polyvalence of the self, in the general attack on one dimensional meaning- and
symbol-systems -why in all of these is there required the additional step to
polytheism, to the gods? Are the gods of polytheism any less dead or eclipsed
than the God of monotheism?
Perhaps it was Sigmund Freud who began to make inroads on this question.
When single-minded religious meaning - the moralistic and doctrinal meaning
of Torah and Creed -failed in the lives of individuals, two things were noted:
(1) the meaning was likely projected in the first place out of a memory and out
of a personal need for completion, and (2) the full experience of the lack (the
death of God) could not be therapeutically fruitful until the personal narrative
and need were broken through by a transpersonal context (e.g., Oedipus). Carl
Jung's experience was similar, but even more radical. Freud had noted many
complexes, each with a single archaic structure (not only Oedipus, but Eros and
Thanatos and so on). For Jung each complex has more than one archetype: the
anima-complex
may be informed by Artemis, Helen, Psyche, Electra, Eileithyia, Kastalia, and I

or many others. It is Hillman, however, who shows why the recovery of soul
power is
ineluctably tied in his own work, as in that of Freud and Jung, to gods precisely at the moment of God's being called into question as a source of deep
meaning.
Hillman's argument and his method is one of "reversion," and it is based on
a view of memoria that is found first in St. Augustine. Hillman discovers in
personal moods a number of fantasies. Within each fantasy (a narrative
structure imagined in biographical memoria) there is a complex. Within each
complex there are, in the manner of Jung, many archetypes. Each archetype

has its articulation in a myth. And a god or goddess presides over each myth.
"Reversion" is not a new mode of diagnosis; it is rather a way - a way to get
purchase on one's own experience of the events of life. It makes events
eventful. In the stories of universal memory chronos becomes kairos. What
otherwise may be causal and logical is now experienced synchronistically as a
narrative sequence, a plot. Ideas and thoughts become images and persons.
It is not that we must find some gods when God succumbs in culture or life
experience. I t is that the gods are there already, released by the death of

monotheistic thinking whose imperialism caused us to think that the

pandaemonium and the polytheism had left. When the bottom drops out of social
and personal meaning, the suffering of pathology reveals the manyness of
extremity precisely in the form of the personae of the gods and goddesses.
This should come as no surprise. Already Aristotle had said in the Metaphysics
that all of Homer's pantheon were resident in his ideas. And Wittgenstein, at the
other end of our tradition of thinking, told us that pictures were trapped in the
syntax of our abstract language. Francis Cornford, in making the connection
between Aristotle and Wittgenstein, revealed the pictures to be mythologia. The
point is that a viable transcendental referent functions like a lowest common
denominator for referential meaning in discourse. I t is crucial to univocal
meaning. But if no god-term or god-term-function operates in language or in life,
all meanings are loosed at once. God dies and the gods are loosed -and in the
Western grammar of meaning this means the Greek pantheon out of whose
mythological parataxes, as Aristotle knew, our philosophical and theological
syntactical forms were given subjective and predicative shape.
Wittgenstein's fly-bottle is filled with Furies (cf. Sartre). The trick is to know
how, like Athena in the Oresteia, to take advantage of the poetic power of
syntax precisely in its failure, transforming confusion into the multivalent
meaning of poesy. Hillman seems to know Athena's trick. I t has to do with
personifying, psychologizing, pathologizing, and dehumanizing. That is, it
has to do with noticing that the relation between the power of soul-making and
the gods is metaphor: the deliteralizing of thinking involves one necessarily in a
re mythologizing of life. American theology almost got this point in the post
Bultmannian hermeneutical discussions. What was missing there was not spirit
but soul. I t will yet take an appropriation in religious studies of a psychology of
religion like Hillman's in order that the full power of metaphor may be felt in the
thinking of soul (psychology) and in the thinking about religion (theology).
The question is not whether there are gods and goddesses. The question is
whether they shall be a resource or an inundating and undifferentiated confusion,
a Babel without names. This latter is fragmentation, but fragmentation's
articulate name is polytheism.